Reminiscencia is a performance piece created during lockdown by Chilean playwright Malicho Vaca Valenzuela. Valanzuela is the sole live performer and from his desk on stage he taskes us through series of scenes and themes using AV material on his laptop projected onto a giant screen. It’s ultimately about memory. How we create a footprint in history and how that does and doesn’t endure. His examples are all taken from his home town of Santiago de Chile.
I have long been of the opinion that Beethoven’s Fidelio is structurally flawed. The first and second acts are so different intone and dramatic intensity that it never seems quite to hang together. Tobias Kratzer obviously shares this view but being smarter than me finds a way to leverage it. For his production at the Royal Opera House in 2020 he takes the two acts and effectively makes the second a commentary on the first. It’s worth quoting his own words:
Like no other opera, Beethoven’s Fidelio falls into two unequal halves. Act I is a historical melodrama on freedom and love in the post-Revolutionary era. Act II is a political essay on the responsibility of the individual in the face of the silent majority, a musical plea for active empathy.
Luxury! Two operatic concerts on consecutive lunchtimes in the RBA. On Thursday it was the turn of the Glenn Gould School’s Rebanks fellows with mentor Paul Groves to present a series of staged opera excerpts directed by Anna Theodosakis. Stéphane Mayer provided the excellent piano accompaniment throughout.
Ajdad – Ancestors (Echoes of Persia) is a new CD from the Amir Amiri Ensemble. I had a chance to hear them play at Alliance Française on Friday night as well as listening to the CD which provided some extra perspective. It’s always interesting to watch musicians. Most of the music on the CD is composed by Amir Amiri with a couple of arrangements of other composers’ work. Amiri’s roots are in the classical Persian tradition but he goes well beyond that with quite strong Arabic influence as well as Turkish, Kurdish and Western classical elements. In a sense it’s a nod to what was once a more integrated musical culture that to some extent has been fractured by the political divisions of the last 100 years or so. Continue reading
Opera’s back with the start of a new COC season and more. Here’s a look at what I think looks interesting in October.
First up there are two theatre festivals with multiple shows. Aluna Theatre’s RUTAS International Performing Arts Festival runs from September 26th to October 9th (various venues). There’s a distinct Latinx twist to this one. Then from the 16th to the 27th at Buddies in Bad Times there’s the Next Stage Theatre Festival run by the same folks as the Fringe. Both are pretty varied with something for pretty much everyone.
Wednesday lunchtime saw the members of the COC’s Ensemble Studio kick of the free concert series season in the RBA. It was good. Pianists Brian Cho and Mattia Senesi started off in fine style with a four hands version of the overture to The Barber of Seville and then it was on to the singing.
Mukashi, Mukashi; Once Upon a Time, currently playing at the Theatre Centre, is a collaboration between two companies; Toronto’s CORPUS and Osaka’s KIO. It explores two characters who feature prominently in the folklore of Europe and Japan; the wolf and the crane. This is done via a playful exploration of two well known folk tales; Little Red Riding Hood and the story of the Crane-Woman who weaves miraculous cloth.
Lucie de Lammermoor is Donizetti’s reworking of his Scottish opera for a smaller, non-subsidised Paris theatre. It’s not just a translation. Some scenes are rearranged and minor characters are pruned leaving only six in the cast plus chorus. Donizetti also incorporated what had become performance practice in Italy, substituting an aria from Rosmonda d’Inghilterra; “Que n’avons nous des ailes”, for “Regnava del silencio”. Otherwise the plot is much the same.
Bernard-Marie Koltès’ Roberto Zucco (translated by Martin Crimp) is currently playing at Buddies in Bad Times in a production directed by ted witzel. It’s a piece from the 1980s, written as Koltès was dying of AIDS and set in the mean streets of the less salubrious part of a European city, perhaps Paris.
1939, written by Jani Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan and directed by Jani ,opened last night at Canadian Stage’s Berkeley Street theatre. The setting is a Residential School in Northern Ontario which is set to host the King and Queen as part of their 1939 tour of Canada. The Welsh, but fiercely anglophile[1], English teacher decides that putting on a production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well would be suitable fare for the royals.
operaramblings 